Owning Up To It 2.0

26 Jan 2009

Since forever, I have lived perfectly happy without a TV. And then came Hulu, which made me an addict. I love that I can watch what I want, when I want it, and I simply feel more at home browsing and searching than sitting in front of a tube with a remote - a matter of generations and geekiness, I guess. Which brings me to my point: when I went there today, I found the following message:

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ‘‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ‘‘Sunny’’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Respect to Hulu, not for messing up (which happens to everyone), but for owning up to it, in straightforward language, instead of the usual obfuscation most corporations opt for in this type of situation. This kind of radical transparency is refreshing.